Testing of High-Definition TV Standard Is Delayed

A high-stakes technology competition aimed at choosing a design for a national high-definition television system, originally scheduled to begin next week, has been delayed until July.

The delay stems primarily from the eleventh-hour decision by most of the competitors to base their systems on the digital language of computers.

The delay highlights the complexities involved in trying to evaluate the six different formats that have been proposed for a national HDTV system, which would provide far clearer pictures and better sound than television of today. And it could make it difficult for the Federal Communications Commission to meet its June, 1993, target for choosing among the various technical proposals.

The competitors include a partnership of American Telephone & Telegraph and Zenith Electronics, another partnership linking General Instrument Corp. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a consortium of Dutch consumer electronics firm Philips, France’s Thomson, NBC and the David Sarnoff Research Laboratory, and the Japanese broadcaster NHK. The winner will have a big leg up in what is expected to be a multibillion-dollar market for HDTV sets, videotape recorders and broadcasting and production equipment.

Lex Felker, a consultant to the FCC advisory committee charged with organizing the testing process, said the sudden popularity of designs that use the ones and zeros of computer code to represent pictures required major technical changes in some of the testing systems.

Each of the six proposed HDTV designs will be subject to a battery of computerized performance tests at a special $15-million facility in Alexandria, Va., and the digital designs have to be analyzed in a different way than those that use traditional analog (wave) technology, Felker said.